The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

I’m interested in Cambodia because of its role as pro-China
spoiler in ASEAN.The U.S. and Japan
would, I think, like to see supremo Hun Sen go away pronto and not lord it over
Cambodia for another decade plus, which is his stated ambition.

Vietnamese attitudes are perhaps more ambivalent.Hun Sen came to power on the back of the
Vietnamese army that expelled the Khmer Rouge and, before Hun Sen lurched
China-ward in 2012, he was seen as a useful bulwark against the amazingly deep
anti-Vietnamese trend in Cambodian society and politics.

However, I see that Carlyle Thayer, who is something of a
leading indicator of Vietnamese opinion, had delivered some dark
mutterings on the occasion of the recent unpleasantness at the ASEAN
Foreign Ministers’ Meeting that maybe it was time for Hun Sen to sleep with the
fishes:

“The current rift shows that Cambodia is the odd country
out, [interested] in pursuing the narrow interests of the Hun Sen regime at the
expense of the common interests of the littoral and maritime states,” Thayer
said.

Protip: When you become the “XX regime” don’t expect
good things.

If there’s going to be a color revolution that
brings Cambodia into the ranks of the pro-Western China containment alliance
(or at least quasi-adversarial frontline state like Burma), Dr. Kem Ley
probably would have played a key role…if he hadn’t been shot to death on July
10 in Phnom Penh.

Dr. Ley presented himself as an “analyzer” and “researcher”
not an “activist” or “politician”.He
did preside over the founding of a grass roots independent political party but
immediately distanced himself from its operations.

I suspect Ley was trying to “color revolution
between the lines” as I put it in my AT article, claim the “safe space” of “apolitical
civil society” and gain the protection of Cambodian laws and international
opinion as much as possible while enabling the formation of a popular force.

It appears not to have worked, as his murder is
widely seen as a political assassination orchestrated by the Hun Sen government.

The whole NGO model of virtuous subversion is taking
a hit around the world, with anti-NGO laws getting passed in China, India, Russia, Israel and I expect some other venues.

That’s a rebuke, I think, to Hillary Clinton and
Anne-Marie Slaughter and their idea of “smart power”.Weaponizing NGOs as political instruments was
a clever way to stress targeted regimes without accountability and, guess what,
walk away from compromised assets without accountability.

That’s a shame, because NGOs were playing major and
positive roles in shaky societies, particularly post-conflict and
post-socialist nations.My closest
experience is Mongolia which, post-democracy, looked like it had been hit like
a truck.NGOs poured in to reconstruct
the society and did a lot of good things, along with bringing along a
considerable amount of baggage, especially in the Christian prostelyzation
line.Cambodia, needing all the help it
can get to rebuild its human capital after the devastation of the Vietnam War
and the Khmer Rouge regime, has been a major focus of NGO attentions.

The PRC, of course, has not signed on to have its
society remade by Western do-gooders, and relationships with NGOs have become
increasingly fraught, for good reason.

An interesting report by Edward Wong in the New York
Times caught
up with Peter Dahlin, the head of a legal rights NGO whose detention by the
PRC was the subject of much high-profile handwringing in the Western press.

He was released and deported by the PRC and ended up
in Thailand.He told Wong:

[His
interrogators] showed him a document about the organization he had started in China
to promote access to legal services, complete with descriptions of employees,
associates and grant recipients. But it was not written by the officers. It
appeared to have been prepared by the National Endowment for Democracy, a
nonprofit group based in Washington that is largely funded by the United States
Congress.

The internal report laid out how Mr.
Dahlin’s small organization had received financing from the nonprofit for the
last five years, and it discussed his program in detail. It seemed to have been
meant for circulation only among the nonprofit’s top directors.

“I realized it must have come straight from
N.E.D. itself somehow,” Mr. Dahlin said in an interview, adding that he had
never seen the document before.

Don’t recall the US government or the NED speaking
up for Dahlin while he was incarcerated.The Swedish government was called upon to do the heavy diplomatic
lifting.

Maybe that's because the NED is seen as an instrument of US destabilization and regime change ambitions layered on top of democracy promotion and the kiss of death for NGOs trying to operate beyond US protection in hostile states.

The most generous interpretation of Mr. Dahlin’s
plight is that he had no idea that the NED was funding his organization (which
had swelled to “15-20” mostly part-time employees and kept the equivalent of
US$26,000 in cash in a safe) through deniable cutouts, or he was simply too
polite to ask.

To sum up, if you’re doing NGO work that has a whiff
of political significance in the PRC, you’ve got a bullseye on your back,
thanks to the US government’s propensity for meddling.

Thanks, Hillary.

I don’t know if Dr. Ley was involved, wittingly or
unwittingly, in US-government related NGO shenanigans.But he was an inhabitant of NGO-land, and his
work drew from, complemented, and perhaps informed the NGO engagement with
Cambodia.

In particular, I’m thinking of this Asia Society report, Democracy
in Cambodia--2014, whose recommendations essentially dovetail with Ley’s
initiative to set up a grass roots political movement that, while bringing the
goodness of true representative government to Cambodia’s people, would be
beyond the controlling and intimidating reach of the Hun Sen government and
state-run media.

The NGO that might have created fatal difficulties for Dr. Ley was Global Witness,
a George Soros operation that attacks the illicit resource exploitation that
underpins less-than-democratic regimes.Their most famous cause is blood diamonds, but they also do jade,
tropical hardwoods, copper, etc.

In early July Global Witness strayed somewhat from their
core brief to deliver an expose of the vast business holdings of the Hun Sen
family in Cambodia, titled Hostile
Takeover.Global Witness
declared that the report an exercise in “data journalism”, its conclusions
derived from combing publicly available Cambodian corporate records.This presentation parallels the spiked
Bloomberg investigation into Xi Jinping’s family holdings using records in Hong
Kong, something that the PRC, now Cambodia’s ally, might have shared with Hun
Sen.

I’m a touch skeptical about these claims and wonder if these
heroic exercises in financial forensics are backfilling to cover up a dossier
dump and protect local informants.Never
know, I guess.

However, I did think it
rather rash of Global Witness to announce that it had relied on information
from “confidential sources” to fill out its report, especially in the matter of
Hun Sen’s black sheep nephew Hun To, an alleged drug dealer.

Anyway, Kem Ley appeared on VOA and RFA and, I’m assuming, a
variety of Khmer outlets to discuss the Global Witness report.He distanced himself from any knowledge of
the intentions and objectives of the authors, while expressing appreciation for
the report and its accuracy.

Actually, Global Witness report looks like, as I
characterized it in Asia Times, “a regime change hitpiece” intended to weaken
Hun Sen politically and provide a justification for a cutoff of foreign investment and government and and NGO
funding to the Cambodian government, and Hun Sen might have decided to send a murderous,
intimidating signal to local activists in response.

A few days later, on July 10, after being tracked for a
couple days by some goons with walkie-talkies, Ley was shot to death at his
favorite coffee spot in Phnom Penh.

I found the media willing to impute the killing to Hun Sen,
which is after all pretty plausible, though it’s backfired politically and the
killing might have been some rogue operation not ordered by Hun Sen.But leaving that aside, journos are
apparently loath to connect the dots between the Global Witness report and Ley’s
death.

It might not be correct to speculate that Ley had a hand in
the preparation of the report, but the idea that it might have been a factor in
Ley’s death is apparently one of those questions that didn’t deserve raising.

Circumspect journalism?Unwillingness to embarrass Big George and one of his flagship
benefactions by implying it cavalierly made a run at Hun Sen from the safety of
London while giving insufficient mind to possibility of local retaliation?Queasiness at highlighting potential
synergies between NGO work and domestic political agendas?

Anyway, Dr. Ley was murdered, and the intensity of the public furor surrounding his death illustrates the vitality of social and political model he was advancing, in which
an increasingly informed and critical public employ their own social media
tools to slip beyond the grasp of an old-school strongman.

The cellphoning and social-media-ing began with Dr. Ley’s
murder.Graphic photos of his body
popped up on social media, supporters and sympathizers flocked to the café/gas
station to gape, grieve, rage, and try to protect the crime scene against government interference.The affair quickly assumed the form of a
protest, as the crowd refused to let Ley’s body be loaded into a vehicle
belonging to an ambulance service controlled by Hun Sen’s wife. Instead, it was placed into an SUV and escorted by Buddhist monks to the Wat Chas pagoda.

Shortly after the murder

A crowd gathers outside the cafe after news of the shooting spreads

Transporting Dr. Ley's body to Wat Chas pagoda after his murder

A wealth of footage immediately made its way onto social media concerning Ley's murder and other events of July 10, showing the ambulance being sent off and the remarkably efficient organization of an ad hoc funeral procession complete with memorial pictures.

Dr. Ley lay in state for more than a week at the pagoda, to the undisguised anxiety of the Cambodia government.

After negotiations with the government to keep politics out of the event and control the route, huge crowds
lined the streets of Phnom Penh as a parade transported his body, draped in a Cambodian flag and enclosed in a glass coffin, to the burial ground in his own province on July 26.

Dr. Ley's body is loaded onto a mortuary car for the funeral procession

The funeral procession through Phnom Penh to the burial ground

Government TV gave the procession a couple minutes on the news, but social media has hours of footage.

Ley's death provides an interesting insight into
Buddhist funerary practices, and hints that Cambodia’s Buddhists are pulling
themselves together after the devastation of the Khmer Rouge years and starting
to claim a central social and political role, something their Therevada
Buddhist colleagues in Thailand and Burma assert with considerable ferocity.

As to the US position on this, the State Department issued a
statement of condolence and called on the Cambodian government to conduct a
full investigation.The US Assistant
Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Tom Malinowski, appeared at
the viewing of Ley’s body and provided a sentiment for the guest book.His trip was announced on July 10, so it’s
plausible that it was scheduled after news of Ley’s death was received.

Tom Malinowski pays his condolences

Assistant Secretary of State Malinowski signs the condolence book

Malinowski's message

As I discuss in Asia Times, the outpouring of popular indignation
surrounding Ley’s death might accelerate any plans the US might have for
getting Hun Sen out of the president’s chair.Hun Sen’s main political rival, Sam Rainsy, is a popular but rather
problematic pol whose political platform is based on virulent anti-Vietnam
sentiment.That’s not exactly flavor of
the month in Washington and Japan, who see Vietnam as a valued asset in the
PRC-containment network.

But a burgeoning social and political resistance movement
kickstarted by Ley’s death might change US calculations.As I wrote at AT, “it looks like Hun Sen
painted a bull’s eye on his own back. But it will take a year or two to
find out if his opponents can hit the mark.”

Monday, July 25, 2016

I’m reading Sterling Seagrave’s epic account of the
Philippines under Marcos, The Marcos
Dynasty, and just happen to be at the part where Edward Lansdale and the
CIA are painstakingly molding Ramon Magsaysay into the magnificent vessel that
will contain American aspirations in the Philippines.Lansdale did everything but tie Magsaysay’s
shoes.Then Magsaysay died in a plane
crash and it was time for rinse-and-repeat with Ferdinand Marcos.

Democracies, for all their virtues, are especially
vulnerable to manipulation during election season, when pols need money, good
press, and, sometimes impunity.You don’t
get those quadrennial opportunities when wrassling with a dictator-for-life. I
suspect that’s one reason why the United States, George Soros, et. al. are so
keen on promoting democracy overseas. The process creates an attractive portfolio of
weak, venal, and competing clients.

Tempting to exploit that. Especially for Putin since it’s been bruited
about that his bete noire, cookie merchant Victoria Nuland, will be running the
State Department if Clinton wins the presidency.

So I’m not averse to the theory that Vladimir Putin is
behind the Wikileaks DNC leak.

Putin probably doesn’t consider himself the first offender
when it comes to leaking embarrassing and destabilizing info.

He believes that the Panama Papers dump—sluiced by a noble
anonymous hacker into that responsible Western whistleblowing conduit, the
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, for loving curation by
mainstream journos, instead of transomed into the hands of that irresponsible
and oh-so-interesting gotta-dump-it-all Wikileaks anti-American cowboy channel—was
part of an effort to target him.

I think Panama Papers was a US-orchestrated inflection point
in the American campaign to destroy international bank secrecy, but
whatever.Plenty of anti-Putin hay was
made out of the leak.

More to the point is this
report on statements by Senator Bob Corker via Radio Free Europe, natch!

A senior U.S. lawmaker
says revelations about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s wealth will be
“destabilizing” to his rule as the Russian population becomes increasingly
aware of them.

U.S. Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, told Voice Of America on February 1 that the Russian
people "are beginning to realize they have a leader that amassed
tremendous personal wealth."

Corker said that revelation was "going to create some additional
instability in Russia."

…

Corker’s remarks come in the midst of
a diplomatic dispute between Washington and Moscow over a BBC interview given
last week by Adam Szubin, the U.S. Treasury's acting secretary for terrorism
and financial crimes.

Szubin told the BBC that Putin was "a picture of corruption," and the
White House later said that his remarks reflected the views of the Obama
administration about Putin.The Kremlin reacted angrily to the
interview and Earnest’s statement, calling it "outrageous and
insulting."

Both Russian and
Western media outlets during the past year have reported previously undisclosed
details about the affluent, well-connected lives led by Putin’s two daughters.

Putin's younger daughter, according to Reuters, also has identified herself as
a "spouse" of Kirill Shamalov, the son of wealthy Putin associate
Nikolai Shamalov.

The couple is thought to have corporate holdings worth about $2 billion.

Treasury’s “terrorism and financial crimes” operation is in
the business of hoovering up financial information by any and all means on
America’s enemies, especially by compromising the confidentiality of banks
doing sanctions-busting business with Iran.Undoubtedly, it has acquired a nice thick Putin folder thanks to various
savory and unsavory ops, and dropping that file is a threat they like to
brandish before Putin.

So, no question Putin coulda done DNCleaks and not lost any sleep
over it.

But did he?

Maybe we’ll never know.

I’ve written before on the attribution
circus: how it’s necessary to sculpt an incriminating dossier even when all
you’ve got is ambiguity and circumstantial evidence, because America can’t have
foreigners hacking the bejeezus out its servers and then saying, Well, looks
like X but…can’t really say for sure.

Instead, we get cybersecurity companies massaging
assumptions and cherrypicking data—and downplaying indications that US
government hacking tools have been turned against us-- so they can say “we
believe” in an impressively scientific manner.This conclusion is fed to the media machine and eventually emerges from
the journalistic nether parts as “X did it.”

Did Putin orchestrate DNCleaks?Maybe, maybe not.Coulda been the FSB team.Coulda been China.Coulda been Anonymous.Doesn’t matter too much in my opinion.The dirt was left lying there for somebody to
scoop up.

One thing for sure is that the Clinton campaign is desperate
to find a bigger villain to shift the focus away from the DNC’s abysmal
security practices and sleazy electioneering revealed by the leak.

Cue Trumputin!

Aside from the possibility that Putin passed the DNC trove
to Julian Assange to embarrass and discommode Hillary Clinton, I’m considerably
more skeptical about the “Donald Trump is Putin’s agent” story that’s been
burning up the Internet.

Trump doesn’t seem to
be the kind of guy that could be run safely and reliably as a foreign agent,
either directly or through a cut-out like Paul Manafort.I suspect the US government has a huge embarrassing
file on Manafort thanks to his relationship with Dimitry Firtash, the gas
industry fixer who was Russia’s main man in Ukraine, but I’m wondering if unpacking
Manafort’s and Trump’s interests in Eastern Europe will reveal more than a lust
for oligarch cash and the first-hand perspective that the US/NATO anti-Russia
policy orchestrated by Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland is a dead-end sh*t
show.

To me, the most interesting perspective on the allegations
of perfidious Russian involvement in the Trump campaign is the effort to gin up
an outsized moral panic around the prospect of the Trump presidency.

He’s a grafter and a scammer who probably expects to lose
the election and milk his followers for a few more millions over the next
decade via a cheesy post-Fox media/political conglomerate.

Trump, I think, would make a terrible president.But a terrible president whose best as well
as worst impulses would be swiftly neutralized by threats of resignation/insubordination/impeachment/mutiny
by the Beltway pros if he really tried to color outside the lines.

I don’t think he’s a fascist with the energy or inclination
to seize state power as leader of a racist mass movement with paramilitary
power employing riot, murder, insurrection, and genocide to achieve
supersized ambitions for national and world mastery.

Is anti-Trump hysteria just part of the electoral race to
the bottom, the need to make him appear even less attractive than Hillary?

Or is it…something more?

At this point, everybody pause for a moment and put on their
tin-foil hats.

OK…everybody ready?Good.

Here’s my take on the whole megillah.

The Clinton campaign is in a quiet panic that the notorious
e-mail server in Hillary Clinton’s basement got hacked and the 33,000 e-mails were exfiltrated for release at the worst possible moment during the election. Like maybe during the convention in Philadelphia.

If the 33,000 deleted e-mails are just yoga appointments and
instructions to florists, it’ll be bad but not fatal.

If they reveal embarrassing political and media canoodling,
worse, politically survivable, but electoral poison.

If it turns out that there was official business discussed
in some e-mails and Clinton’s lawyers deleted them instead of turning them over
to the State Department, I think it’s Hello, President Trump.

If the deleted mails contained classified info, then it’s
lights out.Democrats push her to
withdraw from the race soon enough so that nice Mr. Kaine can carry the ticket,
and Clinton spends the next few years in court.

Nobody knows what could come out, I think. If there were some skeletons in the e-mail server, only Hillary Clinton and her closest associates know. For everybody else, it's pucker up, hope for the best, and expect the worst.

All they know is, any leak of e-mails from the Clinton server is
bad.What to do?What to do? What’s the plan? How does the campaign inoculate against such a
potentially devastating development?

How about a major redirect, one that turns any leak into
evidence of Putin perfidy?Aha!

Here’s how I think it works.

First, harden the narrative that Putin is backing Trump.Time to reach out to prestige media!

Instantaneously and simultaneously, serious chin-stroking
erupts in the liberal commentariat concerning the seemingly unhealthy
relationship between Putin and Trump.

Over in digital media, Talking Points Memo has been pushing
the story relentlessly.Most recent
iteration: It Can’t Be
Dismissed.

What’s interesting to me is that none of these pieces offer
conclusive evidence.We are in the zone
of those two glorious media and rhetorical exemplars, Peggy Noonan and Donald
Rumsfeld.

As in:

Is it irresponsible to
speculate?It would be irresponsible not
to.Peggy Noonan, on the
Wall Street Journal editorial page, as to whether Fidel Castro used
incriminating phone-sex recordings to blackmail President Bill Clinton into
returning miracle dolphin lad Elian Gonzalez to his father in Cuba.

Absence of evidence is
not evidence of absence.Donald Rumsfeld, on
why we shouldn’t worry that UN inspectors found no WMD in Iraq pre-invasion.

What is most amusing, profiles-of-courage wise is that both
Drezner and Marshall are hedging their bets (or covering their asses) in case
the story doesn’t pan out in the body, while pushing the theory in the headline
of their articles.

Anyway, Trumputin now part of the zeitgeist and the Clinton campaign has done the best it can to prepare
for a leak to drop during convention primetime.